I never played SWTOR (but I know friends who played a lot of it). I'd give the game a B+ for its current state.

The gameplay is relatively smooth, and it definitely shows A-Net's "anti-MMO" philosophies wherever you go, at least in the low-level areas I've seen. Grouping with others is a mixed bag at the moment. Right now, there's so many players online that you'll end up fighting with others in anything other than story missions and instanced dungeons unless you REALLY try hard to avoid it. That said, putting together a group of people you choose is much more difficult than the original game because of the lack of lobbies/staging areas and rapidly fluctuating server populations (see below).

As for technical issues, the game is quite stable for not officially being launched yet (although that'll change in a few hours). I've only experienced one crash so far, and ZERO disconnects. The biggest issue is definitely server populations at the moment. The number of slots in the servers varies a lot, and in certain areas, people can be forced into "overflow" instances which makes setting up groups difficult. My guild's 70+ members can't get into the same server at the same time as some don't make it in.

I hope that was a PvP only chr you saw, but I'm not surprised. I find a lot of the anti-grinding pretty decent. I got most of my XP from level 10 to 12 just from exploring Rata Sum, Lion's Arch, and The Grove. Unlike GW1, exploring just means finding points on the map and nets you a good deal of points + some humourous deaths if you fall trying to get to Vista points.

I think they may have gone a little too much anti-grinding. Killing mobs is essentially useless as they give very little xp for the effort. You are better off gathering resources, completing map objectives (POIs, Vistas, etc...) and doing events.

It would be nice if they buffed monster kill xp to speed things up a little.

So far the game seems much better than SWTOR, in practically every way possible. I'm even finding the personal story here more engaging (albeit I only tested two of the storylines in TOR, and never even bothered to finish the one on my level 50 character as I completely lost interest in it.) and that game was praised for its story.

There's a very interesting review from Toms Hardware about scaling on the game: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...rk,3268-7.html
I linked the CPU portion of the page because it looks like the game is surprisingly CPU-dependent, like a physics-heavy FPS would be. That I didn't expect.
AMD had better push those Piledriver chips out, if their current gen of CPU can be bottlenecked by this game! (Yes I know they're taking a FRAPS penalty and performance upgrades are coming down the pipe, but it shows that AMD's CPUs are just enough for this game as it stands.)

__________________"The computer programmer says they should drive the car around the block and see if the tire fixes itself." [src]

Also is the digital collector's edition worth it, or are the items just, meh.

I got burned by SWOTR's digital collectors....lol

Thanks!

I assume you mean the digital deluxe edition? I got the preorder digital deluxe edition, but TBH I'm only using an item I got from PREORDER, not from the digital deluxe stuff. Collectors doesn't get you anything ingame compared to the digital deluxe.
The minipet (Rytlock) may give you a point if they make a minipet collecting achievement like in GW1, although just like GW1 they're not going to make it mandatory to have a digital deluxe edition to max out anything.
I'll let you know when I fire off the Summon Mistfire Wolf skill, as I'm at lvl 19 and I can't use it until lvl 30. In A-Net fashion though, I can't imagine it giving an in-game advantage, although someone is sure to put it in some strange build that has a very limited use. If it ends up being too powerful, it will be the first skill to be nerfed in a following update.
The 1-use items aren't worth it unless you're in a guild that wants to max something right away (which I assume you aren't since you're asking that question). The Golem Banker is speculated to only last 5 days (which essentially makes it a 1-use item): Talk:Golem Banker - Guild Wars 2 Wiki (GW2W)
Even if it's something like one use every five days it would only be useful in dungeons, since there's so many merchants around the game world and you can even access your bank from crafting stations (e.g. cooking station, leatherworking station).
My guild is actually waiting to fire off our Tome of Influence items because so much guild stuff is bugged right now (inviting members has an odd laggy delay, server populations all over the place).

In my opinion, get the regular edition. My purchase of the deluxe edition was an impulse buy, and that $20 would've been better spent on getting me real food rather than what my school calls food .

__________________"The computer programmer says they should drive the car around the block and see if the tire fixes itself." [src]

I think they may have gone a little too much anti-grinding. Killing mobs is essentially useless as they give very little xp for the effort. You are better off gathering resources, completing map objectives (POIs, Vistas, etc...) and doing events.

It would be nice if they buffed monster kill xp to speed things up a little.

Killing mosters is really necessary for gathering ressources for crafting emblems. After 40-45 hours of play, with mostly exploration and zone completion, I can't get pass lvl 75-100 on both my crafting profession as I always need more fine crafting materials... and leather

Also, most cooking food give you xp per kill, which boost the utility to kill monsters even more. I saw some pie or w/e giving 20% magic find and 10 xp per kill.

But I agree you can level faster at the begining just by completing zones and collecting ressources, by at higher lvl, when you need to craft, you may have some problems...

The biggest disappointment so far is the party system that is really broken. I me 30 minutes to enter a dungeon with my guild. Also, infos on the party UI and the Guild interface are not updating :(

Anyways, really a great game, I don't see the time when I play, and it's well balanced between the possibility of a very relaxing play, and really hard WvWvW fight or dungeon, that are nothing like in WoW! Much better :P